7 takeaways from the GOP contests

Rick Santorum was the toast of the GOP last night and Mitt Romney went home without any gold medals in one of the most surprising evenings yet in the presidential nominating contest. Santorum broke out the broom and had a clean sweep of the three races in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota.

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Below are POLITICO’s seven takeaways from the results:

1) Boston, we have a problem

Romney is still by far the likely nominee. He is still the only candidate with resources and an organized team. Tuesday’s elections were “non-binding beauty contests.” And this is likely a temporary stall: Mitt Romney will regain momentum heading into Arizona, Michigan and Super Tuesday.

But Romney was locked out of first place in all three races Tuesday night, including Colorado, a state where he won more than 60 percent in 2008. He was expected to win two of the races a few days ago and viewed as the likely victor in Colorado a few hours before voting began.

Even with the Romney campaign’s pre-spinning of the losses, the Rick Santorum clean sweep was a stinging rebuke of the front-runner. In the end, he got just over half the percentage he took in Colorado four years ago.

The expectation heading into February was that this would be a strong month for the former Massachusetts governor.

But his Florida momentum evaporated with his comments about concern for the “very poor,” which may have turned off conservative voters in these races.

Now, Santorum has more statewide wins than Romney, and Arizona — which has a sizable Mormon population but also a conservative-leaning GOP electorate — is the stage of the next big Republican battle.

Romney’s ongoing struggles with the conservative base of his party may not matter once he becomes the nominee. But it’s going to be awfully hard for Romney boosters to argue those problems are being overhyped by the news media in light of Tuesday night’s outcome and the lack of enthusiasm it speaks to.

This is not a near-death experience for Romney like his loss in South Carolina. But it underscores the fact that his team is still searching for a message — and for a candidate who has done limited conservative outreach.

His election night speech — his wife, Ann, was not on hand for this one — was muted. He spoke in platitudes and campaign slogans but offered up little that was new — save for anecdotes about his father as a from-the-ground-up success, which was noticeable given how often Santorum speaks about his own humble beginnings.

Romney’s campaign, as the results in Minnesota and Missouri came in, sent out an op-ed he has written focusing on deficit reduction, an issue that will play well with fiscal hawks. But given how little meat he’s put on the bones of his own message, he’s going to be pressed to put out more by way of policy and his ideas for how to lead the nation.

2) Santorum pressed the reset button with gusto

Santorum’s wins Tuesday night let him claim some of the spoils he lost when he was called the runner-up in Iowa on caucus night, only to be declared the winner well after the fact.

Santorum’s task now is to try to get any semblance of a bounce out of his win. That eluded him after Iowa, despite the fact that he made the race extremely close on a shoestring budget and after being largely ignored by the political press throughout 2011.